When dad booted up the dusty machine, we saw the problem right at the top of the screen. Where “Q*bert™” should have been, was “??2r t™” instead. Looks scary, but it was nothing we hadn’t seen before. It could have been way worse; nothing could have come up at all, which happens about as much as any other problem one could imagine. Those old arcade games need love–they’re very sensitive creatures.
My passion for arcade games and their restoration began in the same place my father’s did: Flipper (Gottlieb, 1960). Electromechanical*, Add-a-Ball, 1,100 units made. He got it as a gift from my great-uncle when he was in his late-teen years. He fixed it up, and it was eventually put in my childhood bedroom. It still has an entire set of glow-in-the-dark stickers (a prize from my kindergarten class) on it as it stands partially deconstructed in our basement. It clocked in at a decade of operation: forty years of tune-ups, and a decade of dormancy. But that magician on its backglass is still smiling even after all that time, partially because of us; it’s a fantastic feeling. The rabbit he’s pulling out of a hat is still scary, but at least it’s there in the first place.
After Flipper came the solid states**: Time Machine, (Data East, 1998, not to be confused with Zaccaria’s 1983 machine of the same name). Then came Doctor Who (Midway, 1992), and The Who’s Tommy Pinball Wizard (Data East, 1994). And then the electromechanicals, of which there were too many to list. But it wasn’t until the arcade games came into the house that the pinball tables took a back seat. At that point, they all moved into the back corners of the garage, got sold as project machines, or disappeared with no explanation from my dad. Even the bagatelle table*** I was planning on building just… didn’t happen. Its frame was put in the garage alongside Dancing Dolls (Gottlieb, 1960) and Juke Box (Chicago Coin, 1976) as I went off to college to study things that had nothing to do with electronics. Secretly, I always thought my dad was discouraged by the sheer number of broken-down machines we had once I also got too busy to care about them.
At that point, I was much too concerned about my grades to focus on anything other than school, let alone dedicate my time and energy to getting the Pinball Wizard to do his magic again. The collection my dad had amassed just sat there, accumulating dust as I likewise amassed book after book to read for my classes. Where the year before we’d be in the garage soldering things and polishing relays, I’d be reading in my room for hours as he’d sit and watch golf. Then, when I moved away, progress came to a halt.
~~~
hey Chris, hope you’re doing well at school. We got a new machine for you to help with once you’re home. Dave said we could get it for free if I can repair the monitor
Nice! Which one did you get? Were you able to repair it?
Pac-Man arcade party. haven’t started, thinking about working on it a little next week
Okay
Read Saturday
~~~
I started to forget the facts I once knew about pinball tables and their history and replaced them with book titles. Every time I’d talk to my family, I’d ask dad about the machines and it was always “Haven’t started.” I’d echo him when I’d talk about assignments. “Haven’t started” quickly turned into a greeting between us two towards the beginning of my time living away from home. The only vestige of pinball expertise left would appear in quick “Hey, rewind real quick–that’s No Good Gofers [Williams, 1997] in the background!” when watching movies with my friends. No word from dad, nor from me. It had even gotten to the point where I’d deleted the pinball games off of my phone; they suddenly stopped updating, and I didn’t have enough space to accommodate all the PDFs and EPUBs and pinball. It all just went away. It wasn’t important enough, nothing but a trifle.
I figured it would be fine for me to let go of that hobby, seeing I knew effectively nothing about electronics, and would probably never have time to learn. Dad would always hand me the Novus polish and Windex while he did all the actual repairs. He’d try to explain all these concepts to me which flew right over my head, like how certain colored wires are marked like this in the schematics and it’s actually “solder,” not “sauter.” All things that were way beyond my area of expertise, but I tried my damnedest to understand it. Even still, it wasn’t enough: I just couldn’t wrap my head around what the hell dad knew so well. I just left it behind like a distant relative’s hand-me-down shirts, I’d grown out of it.
And yet, there was still something so fascinating about it all–that part I couldn’t shake for the life of me. I was orbiting a secret club of people who know how the magical entertainment boxes do magic, my father being a long-time member. The same group who could look at something like
and know exactly what it all means; my god, how I wanted to be part of that group!
The thing they don’t tell you about electronics is that they are, in fact, kind of magic. In some way, all the squares and lines you’re looking at actually mean something. Some lines have gaps in them, those are switches. Squares are different chips, and the numbers on them represent individual pins, sending different pulses of electricity towards other chips, which interpret them as an orange circle on the screen. Perhaps most exciting are the sound chips (not pictured) which, when observed with an oscilloscope, produce the sound waves that make Q*bert say things like “@!#?@!” or “HELLO, I’M TURNED ON” which plays at machine startup (and admittedly has aged like milk). So, as one could imagine, when hardware starts to deteriorate, the machines end up losing that spark, and things go wrong. The machine starts to forget pretty major things: you can lose high score data, button inputs get harder to trigger, and sprites get garbled so that what once was a coil snake has now become an Eldritch Abomination made up of Q*bert’s forehead and slime. With electronics, the magic has an expiration date.
By the time Q*bert joined the entourage of broken-down hardware in my parents’ garage, it was already my senior year, and I was equally run down. I’d been working on two majors for the past three years, and I felt totally lost within them. I was buried in obligations that I felt really meant nothing; I wasn’t passionate about them, they were all just meaningless things I had to do. And because of them, I had long since drifted away from the house, the machines, and even my dad. It had been months since he and I had said anything to each other directly. So it came as a great surprise when I received a message from him about a week before I went home.
~~~
[IMG_1982 – A picture of a run down Q*bert machine]
[Eyes Emoji]
When did that come in?
Brought it home yesterday, Dave wants me to fix it up a bit
Cool
Read 1:38 PM
~~~
And this time I had an idea.
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Need help?
Read 1:43 PM
Today 9:14 AM
Sure.
~~~
When I finally got home again, I made the rounds: put my backpack in my room, started a load of laundry, got attacked by my dog, and went straight to the garage to see what dad was working on. Opening the door, I was greeted with the oh-so familiar sight of dad with his little magnifier-headlamp thing, hunched over his PCB boards and poking at them with both ends of a multimeter. The horrible smell of melted solder was dissipating, but still enough for me to get a rush of anticipation for the machine’s imminent restoration.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“Not much, I’m just trying to figure out why this chip isn’t talking to the other one.”
He then put the board back into the machine and booted it up. Not only did Q*bert miss his entrance and get replaced by his bastard twin, ??2r t, but he also failed to robotically announce that he was turned on. These otherwise meaningless things were of great concern to dad and I: like he had said, the chips weren’t talking to each other.
The next step then was to go through the schematics, a beast of its own, but ultimately doable. However, when I looked at all the triangles and squiggles covering the page from corner to corner, as though I’d developed the knowledge by coincidence, things suddenly made sense. “This line connects to this chip, and the pulse passes through these pins towards this other chip, but it makes a jump somewhere in this alternator, which is probably why the sprites are garbled: that chip contains overlay data and part of it is getting lost in that jump, so it’s more or less playing a game of broken telephone trying to get Q*Bert on the screen.”
“Hm.” Dad hadn’t thought of that.
It was the first time I’d ever made a suggestion about what needed to change, and yet he was actually considering it. I had felt confident, but not sure, so I was curious to see where it was going to go. He took the component off, replaced it with a newer model, and suddenly…
“HELLO, I’M TURNED ON.” And there they were…
~~~
I don’t believe in miracles–I think that anything can be explained if you really whittle it down. This was no exception. And, as soon as I’d figured out the problem, it was washed away by more books. I moved back to school, the TV in the living room started playing golf again, and Q*bert was wrapped up and put in the bed of dad’s truck, strapped in for the big three-hour drive through Connecticut to get it back to Dave. I knew that electronics were still of interest to me, but they proved to be a hobby I didn’t have time for–nothing but a bagatelle–and it was seemingly the same for dad. The most recent solid state, Hurricane (Williams 1991), left over a month and a half ago. There have been no further updates.
* Electromechanical – Attributed to tables including and following Contact (1933), electric tables with solenoids and coils instead of computer chips
** Solid state – Beginning with Spirit of ‘76 (Mirco Games, 1975), referring to tables that use computer chips instead of strictly solenoids and coils
*** Bagatelle – ancestor to modern pinball with spring launchers, but no flippers. Score calculated by pin hits and which holes balls fall in. From Italian “bagatella” meaning – “a trifle” or “a decorative thing”